Late Bloomer
by Melissa Pritchard
Doubleday | a division of Random House, Inc. | New York, March 2004 | Hardcover
* One of the "Best Books of 2004" - Chicago Tribune, 19 Dec 2004
* Publishers Weekly starred review 23 Feb 2004
* A Borders Bestseller
*Late Bloomer News* *Late Bloomer named one of the "Best Books of 2004" - Chicago Tribune, 19 Dec 2004 The July 2004 issue of BookPage, America's Book Review Magazine, recommends Late Bloomer along with two other novels for the best "serious chick lit" summer reading. The webzine Empowerment 4 Women raved about Late Bloomer in its May/June 2004 issue. To check out the review, click here. The Washington Post reviewed Late Bloomer Sunday, April 11. Click here to read it! To be posted soon . . . an interview with Melissa Pritchard about Late Bloomer in the East Valley Tribune, April 4, 2004. Interviewer, Betty Webb. MP and Late Bloomer were featured in an Arts & Entertainment Section cover story in The Arizona Republic, March 14, 2004. The Chicago Tribune reviewed Late Bloomer March 7, 2004 . . . click here to read the front page review that called the book "electric and exciting." A Starred Review of Late Bloomer and a 'Q & A' interview with Melissa Pritchard both appeared in Publishers Weekly, February 23, 2004. Late Bloomer received a four star "Mainstream Fiction" review in the March 2004 issue of Romantic Times Bookclub Magazine. Late Bloomer was featured in Vanity Fair magazine's March 2004 issue under "Hot Type." From the review . . . "In Melissa Pritchard's ravishing Late Bloomer (Doubleday), a strapped divorcee with a teenage daughter stumbles into ghostwriting Native American romance novels, only to find life imitating art." by Elissa Schappell Late Bloomer was favorably reviewed in both the Library Journal and Booklist magazine. |
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* Late Bloomer was published in paperback by Anchor Books (March 2005).
* Late Bloomer
is now available
in LARGE PRINT
from Thorndike Press
(August 2004).
After one failed marriage and numerous dating disasters, Prudence True Parker teaches Advanced Personal Journey at a community college in Arizona, a class popular with students (mostly older, divorced “Seekers”). Parker’s own personal journey has led to a mountain of debts, and she is beginning to feel desperate. Salvation comes at the local library, where she meets Digby Deeds, aka Mildred Crawley, the acclaimed author of the Savage Passion romance series. Nearing the end of his life, Digby is looking for someone to keep Savage Passion alive and offers Parker the final forty plots of the wildly popular series. Moved more by financial desperation than literary aspiration, Parker reluctantly accepts the bequest.
Just after taking on the project, Parker visits her friendly local psychic who foresees the arrival of a romantic stranger in her life.
The prediction comes true with startling speed: At a Native American charity event in Oklahoma, Parker is swept off her feet by a mysterious young Comanche artist, Ray Chasing Hawk.
A month later, Ray shows up on her doorstep and they embark on a passionate love affair. Fired by the irresistible desires their affair awakens, Parker begins writing her first Native American romance. Real life gives her plenty of inspiration for her fictional plot, her home fills to overflowing with visitors—including Native American activists, medicine men, wolves, celebrity dogs, and her own slightly eccentric widowed mother from Hawaii—and Parker eventually finds herself joining several of them on a madcap trip to the Mountain Sun Dance in northern Arizona. In a hilarious, totally satisfying conclusion, the pieces of Parker’s life fall into place at the annual Romance Writers convention in Houston, Texas.
Smartly written and laugh-out-loud funny, LATE BLOOMER is a high-spirited tale of romance, captivity, and savage love women of all ages will relish.
(synopsis from www.randomhouse.com)
REVIEW
Publishers Weekly, February 23, 2004
Melissa Pritchard
Doubleday, $23.95 (320 p.) ISBN 0-385-50304-0
Pritchard's brilliant mix of romance and satire may have a heart made of cactus, but it goes down like hot Indian fry bread dipped in honey. "Shouldn't one live one's romance, not read about preposterous imaginary ones?" muses Prudence True Parker, college prof and single mom shortly before romance novelist Digby Deeds (aka Mildred Crawley) bequeaths her the last 40 plot lines from his bestselling Savage Passions series as a reward for passing him toilet paper in a lavatory. Parker, author of one award-winning book, hasn't written written anything in years, but has mounting bills and a 17-year-old daughter to support, so she accepts. Then Parker meets gorgeous Ray Chasing Hawk, Comanche artist (and former porno films soundtrack composer), a self-styled "Lord of the Southern Plains," 14 years her junior. Although Hawk likes to bite rather than kiss and says, "[Y]ou are so white you glow in the dark," he's soon sharing Parker's Arizona nest, painting, modeling and preparing to become a Sun Dancer. Meanwhile, a parade of vividly drawn characters, including Hawk's fellow Sun Dancers, invade Parker's white-bread life as Hawk teaches Parker that "savage" love bears little resemblance to the novels she's been secretly writing. Pritchard's quicksilver ability to blend her biting social/political commentary with a rueful analysis of relationships makes this lesson in true romance an absolutely sage-scented delight. Agent, Joy Harris (Mar.16)
Forecast: The author of three story collections (The Instinct for Bliss, etc.) and two novels (Phoenix and Selene of the Spirits), Pritchard has won two Pushcart prizes and the Flannery O'Connor Award. Readers of literary fiction who eschew romance will go for this one, while the jacket art, a close-up of an archetypal Romantic Times couple in a clutch, will draw romance fans.
--Melissa Hall
INTERVIEW
Publishers Weekly, February 23, 2004
"Wickedly Savage Passions"
PW: What inspired you in Late Bloomer [reviewed on p.51] to connect the romance novel to the plight of the contemporary American Indian?
Melissa Pritchard: I have been living with an American-Indian man and have been involved in aspects of Native American culture for five years now. Like Ray Chasing Hawk in Late Bloomer, [the man I live with] is a Comanche artist studying to be a Sun Dancer. While at a used-book store, I accidentally walked down the romance novels aisle and happened upon a whole row of [books whose jackets featured] passionate, bare-chested Indian men. I remembered my sister, who runs a bookstore, years before suggesting I compromise my literary soul and write a romance novel for profit. I can't keep them in the store, she said, especially the Native American ones.
PW: How many romance novels did you read to prepare?
MP: I bought 20 or 30 paperbacks at the same used-book store mentioned above, brought them home, skimmed them in one night, returned them to the store and got my money back. I wanted to be able to mimic the high-flown tone, the emotional bloat and flushed, congested prose. The weird part was, with a couple of the books, I found myself falling into a romantic semiswoon! Dangerous stuff, I thought.
PW: You describe your heroine, Prudence True Parker, as a disappointed idealist who has made "three safe choices: Chastity, Charity and Teaching." Does that also describe you?
MP: Well, it certainly has described my life at times, though chastity has been the most poorly kept of the three Parker/Pritchard virtues!
PW: Prudence regards the staff of a publisher attending a Roman Writers of America convention as "exploitative manipulators of female loneliness, purveyors of stereotype, cashing in on the myth of the savage warrior." So why are readers and authors attracted to the genre?
MP: Romance novels satisfy a very specific fantasy of romantic love that seems to be a powerful part of the female psyche. If men gravitate to pornography, women incline to romance. If men tend to be frightened or alienated by women's emotional attachments and women to be put off or baffled by men's wandering, indiscriminate sexual lust, it makes sense they would each create fantasies, adult fairy tales, to readjust the strangeness of the other sex into something more identifiable and comforting.
PW: Do you feel that the entire romance industry is exploitative?
MP: No, I really don't. But it perpetuates something slightly dangerous, that there's this notion, that there's this perfect love out there, and it can distract you from the work of loving yourself. I'm intrigued by the romance industry.
PW: How does it feel to be perceived as a literary and romance author?
MP: Oddly delightful. Once I'd realized this was happening, that I was writing an antiromance turning into a romance within a romance, that I could have Prudence's personal love story mirror, by the end, a romance, I felt the giddy sensation of having turned some sort of literary pirouette.
PW: What's the difference between a love story and a romance?
MP: A love story takes a lot more work in the real world. Once of the reasons people like romances is that they're artificially shaped to give a pattern and meaning. It's not as messy as everyday life or as difficult or thorny. A real love story is sometimes exhausting. A romance is deliberately constructed to yield a certain result; the ambiguities are trimmed out, so it's neater and more pleasing to our hearts. But you don't live a love story, you live a life.
PW: Will your next book be another witty love story?
MP: I believe all stories are love stories, and there are kinds and kinds of love, so I will always write about love, but not necessarily romance.
--Melissa Hall
More reviews and interviews with Melissa Pritchard about Late Bloomer can be found here:
--INTERVIEWS--
March 14, 2004
"Arts & Entertainment" section
"Storied Women: Authors explore gender expectations"
by Richard Nilsen
The Arizona Republic
March 2004
"Women's Fiction" section
"Late Bloomer: An acclaimed literary author cozies up to romance novels for her third masterpiece"
by Cindy Schwab
Romantic Times Bookclub Magazine
--REVIEWS--
March 7, 2004
"A Fun Mix of Romance and Romance Novels"
by Beth Kephart
The Chicago Tribune
March 2004
"Mainstream Fiction: Contemporary" ****
by Sheri Melnick
Romantic Times Bookclub Magazine,
March 2004
"Hot Type"
by Elissa Schappell
Vanity Fair magazine, March 2004
"When and under what circumstances does a woman come into her own? Late Bloomer will delight and horrify its readers as they see their own quests for authenticity mirrored in the life of Prudence True Parker, a two-time writer of romance novels. What can be learned from the ritual suffering of an androgynous Comanche warrior? Melissa Pritchard's latest novel dances out the answers in prose of strong originality -- vivid, bold, and wickedly witty. A novel that illuminates our passages as lovers, daughters, mothers, and friends, Late Bloomer is an amazing romp of language and hard-won wisdom."
--Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Four Spirits and Ahab's Wife
"Late Bloomer is a full-bodied education in the spiritual and romantic condition of our brand new century. Pritchard's characters channel the silly, the sublime, the eternal, the suburban, the mythic -- a core sample, in short, of a set of interwoven and fascinating lives. I love how beautifully, seductively, hilariously, tenderly this writer blends genres to bestow on the world this new hybrid elixir."
--Antonya Nelson, author of Female Troubles and Living to Tell
"An oddball, oddly moving coming-of-age (young, middle, old) novel that reads as if Shakespeare, Fielding, O'Hara, and Geronimo ravished the spiteful child of Danielle Steele to produce it. Read it, you'll see what I mean. Pritchard is a brilliant wordsmith."
--Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury and Last Days of the Dog-Men
"Does love make sense? This book may have all four answers to that question. In Late Bloomer, Melissa Pritchard elegantly, effusively does what she has always done -- channel the ages, this time bringing an intense corner of the modern West alive through the dear lens of Prudence True Parker, a thoroughly modern woman in a world larger than life -- with prose to match. There is a sharp literary pleasure on every page of this ebullient up-and-down tour of one woman's search for love -- and the sensible balance between power and submission."
--Ron Carlson, author of The Speed of Light and A Kind of Flying